Adept Adaptation
Bill Bryson in his book "Mother Tongue" laments about that little complication called the
English Language. While the premise for the lamentation is to try and explain what makes
English the premiere language in the world today inspite of its quirks, to me, it seems like
one long list of cribs. While all reviews seem to insist he's in love with the language, I
get the feeling he's actually a bit fed up. (Also, I do not agree with reviewers who call
the book humourous for it is not, and actually is somewhat unstructured for my liking.) He
talks about easy to spot complications like illogical spellings and pronunciations, as well
as more unknown complications (at least to me) like the almost ad hoc mixing and acceptance
of words and roots from foreign sources.

In other words, he draws our attention to the fact that English is a truly pulverized
language.

This fact gives me a lot of confidence, personally. From now on, I shall not feel guilty
about using terms that would be thoroughly unacceptable to the purist, but which would
explain the situation far more aptly and economically than otherwise possible (e.g. "A good
manager needs to possess the skill of Jugad"). I shall not feel guilty about making
spelling mistakes, like forgetting the number of s's or l's in "successfull" (succesfull?
succesful?), and having to use shift F7 every now and then. I am now a lot more at ease with
people hopelessly stuck on sms lingo and acronym usage (rotfl?). My heart now swells with
pride at the sight of Inglish (e.g. "Chappell ko sack karne mein significant benefits
hain"). I no longer lose it when someone constructs a sentence in the past continuous
imperfect future tense or whatever (I am refering to sentences like "In this film there will be a
boy whose father will be dying etc." Hmm how many r's r thr in refering?). I feel confident
because I realise I'm only in the midst of an evolution, and every one of these instances is
actually helping to create a deeper and more enriched language. And in fact, by modifying
the language significantly enough, maybe we will finally arrive at the language Indlish
which will become known as the Indian of Indian languages and will be spoken by 50% of the
world's population, and finally unite our country on linguistic grounds. Who knows.

Another source of confidence is the realisation that when I pulverized Hindi during my
school exams, I was only honing my skills, though in a different context, a bit like testing
a new cancer medicine on mice before testing it on humans. My teachers didn't see this, of
course, but we all know that the smartest things are rarely appreciated till decades after
they actually happened (Van Gogh, Copernicus, Azharuddin etc). Thus, I proudly proclaim some
of my experimental geniuses via this forum in the hope that I may receive some appreciation
- I singlehandedly derived alternative spellings, new approaches to genders, radical
interpretations of unscientific couplets (e.g. taruvar phal nahin khaat hai -
obviously a tree cannot eat its own fruit, in fact it cannot "eat" anything, unless you
include osmosis and diffusion in which case a tree does indeed eat its own fruit if you let
it decay into manure), lateral approaches to essay writing etc.

My father tried really hard to suppress this creative streak of mine. He made me attend
private tuition (3 different tutors have tried their hand at me), made me subscribe to Hindi
newspapers (of which I would usually read the comics section), forced me to include a daily
Hindi lesson in my timetable (this hour was usually spent day dreaming, another talent
required for true creativity), even gave me "homework". The homework part was quite
interesting because he, being rather creative himself, would come up with tasks like "Chalk
pe nibandh likho" and I would write a nice few sentences on the chemical composition of
chalk (all the time trying to figure out what Calcium would be called in Hindi) much to
everybody's chagrin. The crowning glory, of course, was the 3 month period before my Std X
board examinations when I spent almost all my time memorising essays, answers, spellings,
authors etc. (The rest of my time was spent memorising essays for my History paper, which of
course, is yet another story). All of this effort was very useful from an examination point
of view - these months of effort resulted in a 38% increase in my scores, which is rather
significant by any standards.

Thus, if you've not realised by now, the point I am trying to make is that there is actually
no point.

Passing thought:Reading through the quirks of English makes me realise that the reason it is the premiere
language in the world is that it is actually very colloquial. English is happy to adapt and
be adopted, and that is what makes it so widespread, a bit like strains of viruses that
share the exact same characteristic. Also humans.
- posted by Rallix @ 4:55 AM 2 comments

 
Mandi on my Mundi
A rather typically excellent article by Gurcharan Das has got me excited momentarily. Here he talks about the inefficiencies in the Indian commodity market (in other words, Beck Bagan Market or your local sabzi mandi) and the impact of the entry of professional retailers.

There are a number of insights in the article, but the one that excited me most was this - in trying to answer why is it that in India farmers themselves receive such a small fraction of the actual price that the consumer pays (in other words, why is the farmer's bargaining power so low compared to the traders), he points out the following

"A typical farmer harvests his crop, loads it on his bullock cart, travels 30 km to the mandi, where he is often forced to sell at distress prices. Once at the mandi, he cannot return without disposing his produce. He needs the money and the trader knows it. Had he known the price before he left, he might have waited a few days. Where e-chaupals have arrived farmers are happy because they get to know mandi prices via the Internet."

He goes on the lend support to the entry of professional retailers (which would benefit consumers and farmers alike by reducing the middleman), communication mechanisms like the internet, mobile phones and specifically tickers set up by the national commodities exchange in local languages, bank loans hedged against future prices (which currently the RBI doesn't allow them to do!) and crop insurance.

Thus he successfully lends sophistication to the ancient subject of farming so that overintelligent people like you and I can understand.
- posted by Rallix @ 2:00 PM 0 comments

 
Q. How many Panjus does it take to fix a light bulb?
A. 308 (to say nothing of the dog)

6 family members to frantically organise the celebrations
15 close friends to get drunk in celebration
15 dads of drunk friends to get drunk in celebration
30 cousins and their family (CFOs, lawyers etc) to look their best and go on nostalgia trip
10 cousins and their family from vilayat to roam around with handycams and digicams and go on nostalgia trip
3 dudes to man the bar
15 dudes to roam around serving tangdi kabab, paneer tikka etc
15 more dudes to man the buffet table and carefully label each dish
20 cooks
3 DJ and sidekicks
20 members of mahboob band (Yeh desh hai veer javanon ka specialists)
3 dholak walas (Baari barsi specialists)
20 dudes to carry the bright electric lanterns
30 dudes to dart at pieces of change thrown around by revelers
100 random guests (neighbours, business acquaintances, other welldressed good looking people who everybody imagines is known to somebody else)
1 to actually fix the bulb (accompanied by horse, horse owner and 2 children of the family)
1 petrified labrador that stays under the bed through the occasion

*Note for CFOs/lawyers: numbers are guesstimates and not to be used for audit purposes
- posted by Rallix @ 6:52 AM 2 comments